When I write, I write.
When I practice yoga, I practice yoga.
When I talk with friends, I talk with friends.
Or at least, I wish it were like that.
Because you and I both know how distracted the mind can be, my friend.
You don’t even need to meditate to figure that out.
So the mind needs a reminder once in a while.
“What’s truly important right now?”
I’ll be practicing every day.
A memory is what we decide to remember from an experience – and what we decide to delete and forget.
Intuition is the instant hunch we get after we’ve repeatedly created memories from experiences; the moment we don’t need the conscious memory anymore.
A small (or unrepresentative) sample size leads to inaccurate intuition.
If I’m betrayed three times in my life and have created strong memories around that, my intuition whenever meeting anyone else may be that they’ll betray me too. Three bad experiences have shaped, and skewed, my relationship to billions of others.
How to develop accurate intuition?
The more memories we create, the bigger the “sample size” for our intuition to emerge from, and the smaller the weight of “outlier events” (like being betrayed).
The more deliberately we create these memories, the more deliberately we hone intuition.
Create more memories. And create them deliberately.
The easiest path is to miss all days – you never get going in the first place so you don’t know what you’re missing.
The second easiest is to never miss a day – you’ll get where you want to go with little detours, even if you pay the cost of discipline.
The hardest (and most common) path is to miss a couple of days here and there – now you run the risk of getting lost.
We all miss a day sometimes – so we all get a little lost once in a while.
So what do we do?
We remind ourselves why we got started.
We remind ourselves where we’re going.
We remind ourselves that we’ve been lost before – and that we can always get back on track.
In the series of unlikely life advice: a quote ascribed to Astrid Lindgren’s legendary character Pippi Longstocking.
I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6773397-i-have-never-tried-that-before-so-i-think-i
Only after reading this quote I realized how often we all hold the opposite belief: I have never tried that before, so I think I am not (and will never be) able to do that.
What a sad and disempowering belief.
Which begs the question…
Where are you disqualifying yourself before even trying it out first?
What would life be like if your default belief is that things you haven’t tried before are possible for you?
How would that change your decisions?
How much fear and frustration would you leave behind?
Might be worth journaling about.
Walk for 5 minutes today? That’s excellent – because you walked.
Meditated for 1 min? That’s perfect – because you meditated.
Wrote and published a 50-word blog post? That’s enough – because you wrote and published.
You’re allowe dto
Positive reinforcement through Tiny Trust Builders is all you need.
If you write more consistently than you don’t write, you’re a writer.
If you run more consistently than you don’t run, you’re a runner.
And while every action you take is a vote for who you want to be, you don’t need 100% of the votes to build a habit or adopt an identity.
It’s okay to slip up, it’s okay to take a break, and it’s okay to make a mistake – as long as you cast enough votes in favor of your desired identity.
Don’t be a hardliner nor a totalitarian. Be disciplined without fearing the occasional laps.
Focus on maintaining the majority.
You don’t have to feel certain to start taking action.
You take action to start feeling certain.
You don’t need to be calm to do yoga.
You do yoga to become calm.
You don’t need to have a quiet mind to meditate.
You meditate to cultivate a quiet mind.
You don’t have to speak Spanish fluently to have a conversation in Spanish.
You have a conversation in Spanish to learn to speak Spanish fluently.
You don’t need to know how to love to start loving someone.
You start loving someone to learn how to love.
And while this chain of causality sounds logical, sometimes the logical things are the hardest to remember.
